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The Final Four for Book Nerds

Update: Kentucky and Kansas may have won Saturday on the court, but what might have happened in a literary competition?

Bracket busted? Favorite team long ago ousted? Feeling squeamish about all those amateur college kids making money for everybody but themselves? Or maybe you’re in the camp, shouted down at this time of year and bullied into silence, that views sports fandom as wasted time and evidence of a feeble imagination.

Well, relief is in sight, as Saturday’s Final Four games will yield two winners, who will meet in the championship on Monday night. That will be followed by some breathless office chatter on Tuesday morning, and then the culture will steam full on toward its next collective obsession—which you may chose to embrace or deride as you see fit.

Until then, if you don’t want to be completely shut out of the maddest weekend of March Madness (the final game is played in April, but never mind that), you may want to consult the following rooting guide, which pits four literary alums from each of the remaining schools against each other in a largely arbitrary, fully non-sporting, winner-take-nothing competition. These writers vary in style, stature, and fame, but they have all made appearances in the pages of The New Yorker.

If nothing else, this should give some of you out there a few unique talking points for the next few days. You will risk an odd stare or two, but you’ll be sure to spot a fellow traveller at a bar or viewing party this weekend if somebody nods enthusiastically when you mention, for example, that you’re rooting for Ohio State because Cynthia Ozick got her master’s there.

Kentucky

Picking a representative was a tough choice between the poet Wendell Berry (B.A. ’56, M.A. ’57) and Elizabeth Hardwick (B.A. ’38, M.A. ’39), but since Berry removed his collected papers from the school in 2009 to protest of its affiliation with coal corporations, and wrote that he was ending his “willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University”—well, we’ll respect his wishes.

Hardwick—a fiction writer, widely admired critic, and co-founder of The New York Review of Books—once famously told an interviewer that, as a young Protestant undergraduate at Kentucky, her aim was to be a “New York Jewish intellectual.” Yet despite becoming the consummate literary cosmopolitan and urbane East Coaster—she travelled widely, wrote brilliantly, was a fixture at New York parties, and was married to Robert Lowell for more than twenty years—she nonetheless retained traces of her upbringing, as her friend Darryl Pinckney recalled:

And yet she herself could seem so Southern, in the captivating cadences of her speech, the brilliant charm of her manner. Her whole body was engaged when she got into the rhythm of her conversation.

Louisville

On trains, in airports, and in bookstore displays over the past thirty years, you may have noticed the slow but steady sequential progression of “alphabet books,” by Sue Grafton (B.A. ’61). The hugely best-selling mystery series, starring Kinsey Millhone as a California private eye, began in 1982, with “ ‘A’ is for Alibi,” and by now has reached “ ‘V’ is for Vengeance.” Along the way, ‘C’ was for corpse, ‘L’ for lawless, ‘N’ for noose, ‘R’ for ricochet, and ‘Z,’ Grafton has said, will be for zero. Back in 1994, Anthony Lane surveyed the state of popular fiction by reading his way through the New York Times fiction best-seller list, where, after dispatching Michael Crichton and Clive Cussler, among others, he got to Grafton, at No. 3, with “ ‘K’ is for Killer.” Even back then, Lane was worried about the long road of letters ahead:

…stand by for “ ‘X’ is for Xenophobic Racism on the Rise in the Former Eastern Bloc with Murderous Consequences for the Ethnic Balance of Coastal California.”

Every now and then, in the course of a fairly ordinary murder tale, Sue Grafton scores a direct hit: “She was strung out on something, throwing off that odd crackhead body odor. Her eyes kept sliding upward out of focus, like the roll on a TV picture.” Saul Bellow wouldn’t be ashamed to think of that.

Ohio State

Along with Ozick (M.A. ’50), I was tempted to put forward the children’s-book author R. L. Stine (B.A. ’65), if only because one of his lite-horror books in the mega-popular “Goosebumps” series is titled “The Beast from the East”—which could have been applied to the Buckeyes men’s team after they beat Syracuse to win the East Regional.

The clearest choice, however, is James Thurber—essayist, illustrator, world-class wit, and patron saint of The New Yorker. Thurber enrolled at Ohio State in 1913 but left in 1917 without a degree, which puts him in the company of most college-basketball players today. It was denied, the story goes, because Thurber’s poor eyesight prevented him from completing a mandatory R.O.T.C. program. (After refusing an honorary degree for political reasons, he was awarded a posthumous one in 1995.)

Thurber’s name is firmly connected to Columbus. His book “My Life and Hard Times” was set there, and a theatre, apartment buildings, and even a shopping mall in town bear his name. Essential reading for Ohio State partisans, and for all who remember college fondly, is “Man with a Pipe,” published in The New Yorker in 1951, in which Thurber remembers the life of Joseph Taylor, his favorite English professor and the subject of a portrait by George Bellows, who’d also been a student of his. Taylor forbade the taking of notes in class, once began a session by remarking, “It is possible that all things are beautiful,” and was a devoted partisan of all the university’s sports teams. Thurber noted that Taylor “was so deeply attached to Ohio that no offer of fortune could have lured him away.”

Kansas

There are many to choose from here, including the baseball writer Bill James (B.A. ’71), private-eye novelist Sara Paretsky (B.A. ’67), “Winter’s Bone” author Daniel Woodrell (B.G.S. ’80), and Antonya Nelson (B.A. ’83), whose story “Chapter Two” was just published in the magazine.

For the Jayhawks, though, we’ll go with the great mid-century playwright of the Middle West, William Inge (B.A. ’35), who came to writing later in life, and in the nineteen-fifties had a run of well-received and well-attended productions on Broadway, including “Come Back, Little Sheba,” from 1950, and “Picnic,” from 1953, which won the Pulitzer Prize and marked Paul Newman’s first performance on Broadway, in a supporting role. That same year, Inge was the subject of a Talk of the Town piece in the magazine, in which he recalled touring Kansas in a tent show during summers in college and the past year, which he’d spent living at the Dakota off of Central Park. He also spoke about his distaste for fancy New York restaurants (“Mashed potatoes and corn bread are the thing”).

In 2008, the K.U. Opera performed a musical version of “Picnic” with an original libretto. The show’s composer, Forrest Pierce, described the play’s characters as “lovely, lewd, kindhearted, hurt and hurting human beings. There is no hero, no heroine, no villain or villainess: everyone is each, from moment to moment.”

Game 1: Grafton vs. Hardwick—“ ‘W’ is for… Wait ’Til Next Year,” as Grafton, despite her massive popularity and dogged march through the alphabet, loses out to Hardwick, of whom Hilton Als once wrote: “Both her life and her work are triumphs of style and substance.”

Game 2: Thurber vs. Inge—Thurber is in the catbird seat in this one, as his drollery and light touch beat Inge’s deep exploration of hidden desires and quiet desperation.

Championship Game: Hardwick vs. Thurber—Both were fixtures in the literary world of their times, both masters of tone and style. Hardwick contributed fiction and essays to The New Yorker throughout her career, but Thurber is an institution. Framed prints of his cartoons line the office walls. No surprise here: the in-house favorite wins. Go Thurbers!